B2B Marketing Case Study – The Power of Personas

We’re back with our B2B marketing case study series, where we feature some of our recent engagement in the space. Feel free to pitch in with your own stories!

Background 

Partners have always been a crucial part of the Cisco ecosystem. To give them the support they need to close deals and grow their business, Cisco provides them with training programmes, marketing kits, financing solutions, deal management systems, and much more, through an online portal – Cisco Partner Central.

However, despite its great value to partners, the portal was daunting to first-time visitors. Without any introduction, it was often easy to get lost in an ocean of features and content, leaving the potential of Partner Central unexplored. As a result engagement levels had plenty of room for improvement.

Cisco wanted more partners to sign up and benefit from the portal’s wealth of resources. To accomplish that, Partner Central had to be demystified. Content had to be developed to make it more relatable, and to drum up registrations. GetIT engaged with Cisco to help take this forward.

Solution: Segmented Visual Storytelling

Given the huge amount of material and resources on Partner Central, a fine-grained targeting approach was called for. The portal had to be positioned to specific job roles in order to help partners truly understand what they could gain from it.

Hence, the first step was to define personas within the partner audience. These were then characterised, to give partners on-screen counterparts that they could relate to.

Each character’s journey through Partner Central was brought to life in animated visual explainers. These videos employ a light-hearted tone that stood out from the usual corporate Cisco branding, which helped grab viewers’ attention and interest.

One example is ‘Tom the Technician’, whose journey uncovers resources useful to a technical professional in a Cisco partner organisation: Cisco product configurations, solution builders, training & certifications, and more.

Using this segmented approach, the needs and pain points of each persona can be addressed individually – and the myriad benefits of engaging with Partner Central drilled down into in full detail. The value proposition behind each video is clear: Partner Central is “more than a resource”. It is an indispensable guide for partners, no matter their role or requirement.

Results

Cisco features these visual explainers on Partner Central’s main page in a drive to demystify the portal and attract new registrants. They can also be found on YouTube, where Cisco uses them as marketing tools.

Individual users can learn how useful Partner Central is to them specifically by watching the video most relevant to their job role. This conveys a much stronger message than a single, catch-all explainer, and helps to drive registration.

Read more: the 5 golden rules for marketing to partners and distributors